I grew up in a car world in decline. I watched the Integra evolve into the RSX and eventually the ILX. I saw the eclipse ebbing away. The RX-7 died, the 3000GT died, the Z died, the Supra died and even Chevrolet couldn’t keep the inverted bathtub they called the Camaro running. In the midst of all these various ailments, another deep longing that I still can’t quite explain filled me. Something is wrong with Audi.
Welcome to the run-up to Performance Car of the Year 2023. This year we will be posting breakout stories about each of our 10 competitors twice a week until the full comparison goes live in the third week of January. Let’s get into that.
It was funny in that I had seen the pinnacle of Audi, or at least one of its pinnacles. At the turn of the millennium, we Americans got the B5 Audi S4. It weighed around 3384 pounds, had a twin-turbo 30-valve V-6, 2.7-liter displacement and now nostalgic 250 horsepower. Quattro all-wheel drive was all you got, although it was up to you whether you got an automatic or a six-speed manual. For a long time, this car seemed finicky if you could buy a Subaru WRX or Mitsubishi Evo. (How innocent we all were.) Then I was left in longing for a much longer time.
The problem was that Audi kept making better and better sports sedans. The once-compact sedan became a comfortable midsize car, the 30-valve V-6 became a 40-valve V-8, and what was once a juvenile car has grown quite a bit. It wasn’t the loss I felt when cars like the Supra just disappeared. It was a slow and steady decline that I watched play out in real time.
It’s not that I envisioned driving an S4 and that Audi denied me that opportunity to make their car faster and less accessible. I liked the idea of the S4 as sort of the final boss of the sport compacts. The S4 was the fastest sports compact, the most complicated sports compact, the most luxurious sports compact, but it was still a compact at heart. It was a higher rung on a ladder that started with Hondas and Nissan SE-Rs. As the S4 grew, it lost that connection. As it grew, it lost its charm.
I think Audi knows that it has lost something with its central figure. It even ditched the naturally aspirated V-8 to go back to a twin-turbocharged V-6, and it admirably ripped a few hundred pounds out of its latest generation. But that didn’t solve the problem: it had grown too big.
And then Audi gave America the RS3! That’s it! That’s all we needed! A little car with a supercharged engine that’s a bit of a dream that we could one day achieve from our uncharged little cars, one day maybe even something bigger. We got the last generation RS3 here in America in 2017, and then in late 2021 we got this new 2022 model that’s been available in Europe since ’20. This is part of VW’s larger MQB architecture, called the MQB Evo in this case, so it’s a very snazzy Golf to some extent. But it is just as far removed in the family tree from the Audi Q6 or the Volkswagen Transporter. Take all these comparisons as you can.
Anyway, we’ve made this latest RS3 Performance Car of the Year, and guess what? It was great! We all liked it!
The engine still walks that line between normal and weird, this time an inline-five rather than a five-valve-per-cylinder V-6. The sound is great, if somewhat synthetic, and the power is strong and satisfying. The car also drives better than any Audi should. The engine is arranged transversely, side-to-side rather than front-to-back in old Audis.
We had this thing on the track and it was – it’s hard to imagine, maybe – fun! Buying a German luxury car might be a very serious matter, but this particular one doesn’t feel grumpy behind the wheel. And for such an angry vehicle, it drives with a lot of humor. It’s eager to turn, eager to adjust its line. This isn’t a rocket sled, or a street rocket, or any of the typical Audi stereotypes from the days when iron block engines hung in front of the front wheels, defying any movement of the steering wheel. This RS3 is remarkably lively for something that weighs 3639 pounds, a lot for this rather tiny vehicle.
It was quick on the road, but not just in a straight line. I was glad I got it for one of the twistier sections of our drive through the Catskills rather than a freeway detour or even one of the hairier sections when rain curtains turned tarmac into glass.
Audi is again building a desirable small car. What’s more, we’ve been in something of a renaissance for sporty compacts in general for a number of years now. You’ve seen the full list of cars that came to PCOTY this year. Now the RS3 is joined by a turbo four-wheel drive Toyota, a turbo four-wheel drive Subaru, a turbo front-wheel drive Honda and a turbo front-wheel drive Hyundai if you don’t like either of them. We even have a new turbocharged Nissan Z to work with for those who were mourning the 300ZX’s glory days.
I don’t know what got into the auto industry and Audi in particular that made this type of car make a comeback. I grew up in a college town in NorCal, which means I still have long seen Audi 5000 Avants rumbled down tree-lined boulevards near campus. In fact, I remember the house where two of them were standing in the driveway. And I just checked Google Street View and there are two Audi crossovers sitting in their place. Audi is not a car company like it used to be. It’s an SUV company, at least here in the States. Why some executives decided that after years of successfully getting us to buy Q8s and SQ5s it would make sense to federalize their rowdiest compact sedan, I can’t say. I’m glad they did.
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